Optimizing Lightning with Davina Hanchuck

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with Davina Hanchuck, Senior CRMs Analyst at Instructure.

Join us to learn about how to work on a team of Admins, using the Lightning Readiness Report as an opportunity to clean up your Org, and the case for switching to Lightning ASAP.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Davina Hanchuck.

Working on a Team of Admins

Salesforce Admins superfans may recognize Davina as a repeat guest. Since last we spoke, she has moved from being a solo Admin for a small company to a large Enterprise Org with a team of five Admins. “There are five different people making customizations constantly, so trying to communicate with each other and keep up with everybody else is doing as well as what you’re doing and making sure you’re communicating effectively is super important.”

The team is divided into specialties that they each own, so Davina is in charge of Salesforce CPQ. Every year, however, they switch which department they support and which focus they have. This lets them learn the entire system while only focusing on one piece at a time. Davina has found this extremely useful: “As a solo Admin I dealt with so much of a broad spectrum that I wasn’t really a master of anything, whereas now it’s such a small part of the Salesforce instance that I’m focusing on that I get to master it even more.”

As five people trying to coordinate their activities, Davina’s team relies a lot on effective communication. Slack is a favored tool that gets a lot of heavy usage, but their main tool for collaboration is decidedly low-fi: they all sit together in an open office. Getting feedback or bouncing ideas off of someone is as simple as turning to her neighbor. Or shooting them with a Nerf dart.

Beyond that constant flow of communication, they also make sure to document all of the changes they’re making to Salesforce in Salesforce itself. Davina will be running a session at Dreamforce on just how Instructure does that, so come on by and learn all about it.

Using the Readiness Report

Davina’s team is implementing Lightning in a massive Org and they started by downloading their Lightning Readiness Report, which was “75 pages of awesomeness.” They also needed to dive into their third-party integrations, making sure that all the apps that they use would be compatible. After taking everything into account, they’ve decided for now to focus on just moving the Sales team to Lightning.

The Readiness Report helped them get the leverage they needed to do some much-needed cleanup all over their Org, going through the Accounts, Opportunities, Quotes, and Contact Objects. At the end of the day, Davina had personally archived 580 fields and consolidated eight Page Layouts. “The whole Lightning rollout allowed us to give some focus to the cleanup that we’d been needing to do for some time,” Davina says.

Rolling Out Lightning, Bit by Bit

Now, Davina is focused on customizing Lightning Pages for each sales team, “It’s fun because there’s so much you can do with the Page Layouts now that you have to shift your mindset as an Admin over to thinking like a UI designer.” You have to put your marketing hat on to really look at how users are going to work with your implementation and what’s good for them. “You can get your users so excited about Lightning by just showing them what’s out of the box without even customizing it, so then once you get in and you start customizing it for their processes it’s like confetti.”

For now, Davina is working with four beta users from the Sales team to perfect it: she turned them loose on a raw unaltered version of Lightning and set up a chatter group for them to leave feedback, “Post in here everything that’s weird, everything that hurts, whatever you love and whatever you hate.” She then used that feedback to customize the Pages to work for how her users are working.

“Once we started working on the Lightning rollout and our marketing team got wind that the sales team had access to Lightning they got a little jealous,” Davina says, but marketing has been promised that they’ll be next in line and the support team is chomping at the bit as well. Going slowly, department by department, is the only way to get such a big Org transitioned, but “at some point Classic is going to be your old product,” Davina says, “why would you waste all that money on something that’s going to be old?”

For more insights, make sure to follow Davina on Twitter (@davinahanchuck)

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